Despite continuous efforts of EducationWorld for almost a quarter century to accord high importance to public education improvement and upgradation, human capital development remains a blind-spot of the Indian establishment, academy, and society.
For over three decades the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the independent Pratham Education Foundation has been highlighting poor learning outcomes in rural primary education. The latest ASER 2023 which assesses the learning outcomes of rural teens arrives at the dismal conclusion that almost 50 percent of senior and higher secondary students casually promoted year after year, can’t read a sentence in English or manage common tasks such as calculating time, adding weights, figuring out discounts and repayments.
Regrettably, learning outcomes in higher education aren’t much better. For a start, contemporary India’s GER (gross enrollment ratio) in higher education at 27 percent is low by international standards (Korea: 85 percent). Moreover according to several research studies (Mckinsey Aspiring Minds), over 80 percent graduates of the country’s 45,000 ASC (arts, science and commerce) and 4,500 engineering undergrad colleges are under-qualified for employment in Indian and foreign multinationals. They require prolonged post-induction education and training. Nor are our 1,113 universities much to write home about. None of them is ranked among the Top 200 in the annual league tables of the world’s best universities published by the London-based QS and Times Higher Education. This despite some of our universities being of over 150 years vintage.
Against this backdrop, since 2007 we have been rating India’s most reputed schools, preschools, ASC colleges and universities slotted into various categories — to eliminate apples with oranges type comparison — inter se. The objective of the rankings is to encourage education institutions to improve their performance on several carefully ideated parameters of education excellence. We believe that our detailed annual league tables have aided and enabled school, college and university managements to conduct periodic SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities and threats) self-assessments to improve and upgrade their curriculums.
For this summer issue, following the termination of our long-standing contract for conduct of field surveys by the Delhi-based C fore, we have engaged the Bangalore-based AZ Research Partners Pvt. Ltd, a premier market research firm to partner with us to rate and rank India’s best ASC and private engineering colleges. League tables rating and universities and B-schools will follow next month.
Meanwhile please note that ASC and engineering college league tables aside, there’s a wealth of carefully curated content in this pre-General Election issue of EducationWorld. Read, learn and absorb. And perhaps transform into a QEFA (quality education for all) evangelist.
